Elected Politicians’ Perceptions of Socio-Economic Inequality in Substantive Representation and its Causes

A rich literature has shown that there are systematic socio-economic inequalities in substantive political representation across country contexts. Specifically, the preferences of less affluent groups in society are less well represented than those of affluent groups, even in the most egalitarian democracies (Gilens 2012; Lupu and Warner, 2022; Mathisen et al. 2023; Persson and Sundell 2023). Recent work on the topic has primarily been devoted to understanding the mechanisms that cause these inequalities, suggesting that factors related to money (e.g. politicians’ dependence on rich people for campaign contributions, or the varying financial power of interest groups) as well as factors unrelated to money (e.g. the lack of descriptive representation in parliament, the unequal political participation of disadvantaged groups, or their lower political interest/knowledge) are causes of representational inequality (Rosset, 2016). However, little is known about the perspective of politicians themselves: Are they aware of these inequalities? And how do they explain the discrepancy? The question is relevant because politicians, in theory, have the ability to fight representational inequalities. For example, they can try to alter political recruitment procedures (to fight the lack of descriptive representation), or they can explicitly invest time and money to learn about disadvantaged groups’ preferences (to avoid the perceptual biases that originate from the unequal participation of these groups). However, this hinges on politicians’ awareness and understanding of the phenomenon. Our paper contributes to the field by studying elected politicians’ perceptions of the causes of such socio-economic inequalities. We rely on qualitative interviews with 435 parliamentarians from nine different countries (Australia, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland), conducted in 2022-2023. We asked politicians two questions: (1) “Around the world, political scientists have found that policies tend to match the political preferences of advantaged societal groups—like those with high incomes—and tend to be less responsive to preferences of disadvantaged groups. Do you think politicians are generally aware of this fact?”, and (2) “Having established that weaker social groups are less well represented, political scientists still lack clear answers as to why this is the case. Why do you think weaker social groups are less well represented?”. We use a mixed methods approach to analyse the transcripts. First, we conduct a qualitative content analysis to explore how politicians themselves make sense of the topic. In a next step, we develop a codebook and perform a quantitative content analysis to test how many politicians signal awareness of representational inequalities, and how frequently different possible mechanisms are mentioned, in relation with ideological and socio-demographic characteristics. The findings complement extant research by giving a unique insight into the perspectives of the actors that are ultimately responsible for representational inequalities.